“Morrison said Thursday in a statement through his Dublin public relations firm that the report was ‘utterly without foundation’ and planted by an unknown hacker. Morrison said he remains ‘very happily married’ to former Miss Ireland Michelle Rocha, with whom he has two children, aged 3 and 2.
“An e-mail sent to the AP on Thursday by the office of Morrison’s Hollywood publicist, Phil Lobel, said the publicist’s Dec. 28 announcement of the birth was based on information from Morrison’s hacked Web site and that ‘all those with Van Morrison regret any confusion this may have caused.’
“Morrison’s statement, issued by the Dublin branch of the U.S.-based public relations firm Fleishman-Hillard Inc., said his Web site has been hacked at least twice in recent months. The statement was issued by John Saunders, senior partner of the firm in Europe, who confirmed to the AP the authenticity of Thursday’s statement.” – Associated Press
Two columns with the right thought, but no solutions -- possibly because there is no solution. Simply put, newsrooms have to understand that 1) quality is an unbreakable part of content and 2) not everyone is qualified to produce or maintain it, the same way not everyone is qualified to be an investigative reporter.
Yes, that means you have to devote more of your resources to the people whose job it is to maintain quality and standards -- and less to something else you might think was more fun/meaningful/necessary to do. Yes, you can do it with fewer people than you used to if you have better tools. But the mindset that creates a quality control person in any business is not the same that creates a content creator.
But the main thing is to realize that readers, wherever they are and however they come to things, do value accuracy, precision and the like, and don't just value that we wrote about something.
Finally, of all the changes one can make, the most important is: You have to have copy flow. You can't just let everything pile in at the last minute. It's amazing what you can do if you have time to do it.
#1 Posted by David Sullivan, CJR on Fri 8 Jan 2010 at 04:06 PM
In the Star-Trib's new system, it sounds like the burden will come down on the shoulders of the originating editors, who in my experience are already overburdened. As a career copy editor, I know that even the most diligent originating editor is going to miss things, regardless of whether the reporter spell checked her story or even read back over it after the originating editor got done with it. Editorial checks and balances are a big part of the process of keeping faith with the readers and earning their respect. This will erode that faith and respect to the breaking point.
Companies that come up with a plan like the Strib's are embarrassing to their industry, and the editors who attempt to sell this nonsense to the staff and the public rather than walk away are jokes themselves.
As Upton Sinclair said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
#2 Posted by Tom B., CJR on Fri 8 Jan 2010 at 05:11 PM
The Swiss-based Media and Society Foundation is implemeting across the globe a unversal media quality management standard implying, among other things, quality control in the newsroom. We are a group of mostly retired media professionals working on a voluntary basis out of the conviction that society needs stronger media and that media will only be stronger if they become more transparent, more accountable and more efficient. Our media quality management standard is slowly but surely gaining recognition among media organizations in most parts of the world, but the US remains an exception. We are told Americans dont believe in such things. It feels good to read Craig Silverman's piece and see that some Americans do feel the same as we do.
Guillaume Chenevière (www.media-society.org)
#3 Posted by Guillaume Chenevière, CJR on Sat 9 Jan 2010 at 02:43 AM
Asking reporters to use a spellchecker is not a path to accuracy. Spellcheckers can just as easily introduce as many errors as they correct.
Truth! I spell-check as the last step before sending on a story, after having manually checked for errors. It also helps for reporters to read each others' stories before letting an editor see them. I do that sometimes with major stories.
#4 Posted by Bradley J. Fikes, CJR on Sun 10 Jan 2010 at 05:43 PM